Refugees Stuck in Limbo at Desolate Egypt-Libya Border

Civilians fleeing Libya's violence -- many of them ethnic Africans forcibly expelled by rebels -- have found themselves in a no-mans-land stretch of desert

Brian Dabbs

SALLOUM, Egypt -- Posted outside the tent cities, made of UN
logo-emblazoned tarps that are fastened with boulders to fight the
blistering winds, men peddle wares from shampoo to key chains and
sunglasses to canned goods.

Women wash their dishes and their
hair with water from vats erected in an open section of the camp.
Children kick around undersized basketballs turned soccer balls and play
tug-of-rope, escaping the monotony of what has become their new life
here.

Between the Egyptian border post of Salloum and the east
Libyan frontier, this refugee camp, a single square mile in size, has
come to house hundreds of migrants who have fled the violence in Libya
but are unable to legally enter Egypt.

Inside the former
departure terminal on the Egyptian side, dozens of burqa-clad women sit
with clutches of children in their home for the foreseeable future.
"Play with your children to help them cope with stress," reads a UNICEF
poster plastered against one wall of the congested hall. Despite signs
forbidding cooking, women make tea on small stoves throughout the
building.

As clashes rage in western Libya, where all sides of
the conflict appear set on sustaining the violence, the country's
refugee and displacement crisis in recent weeks has shifted primarily to
the Tunisian border. But roughly 800 migrants, mostly of African
origin, who fled violence and discrimination in war-torn Libya, remain
in limbo in Salloum.

Nearly three months after violence erupted in Libya, these migrants are both expectant of the future and nostalgic for the past.

"Life
was too good," Hawa Absor, Somali by origin but a Benghazi and Brega
resident for the 15 years of her life, said as she sat outside the
terminal, garbed in a brown headscarf with green and yellow Islamic
dress. "We stayed for two days in Brega during the bombings. Then the
thowar [revolutionaries] said to us 'You have to leave now.'"

Absor,
along with two sisters, a brother, and her parents, has spent more than
two and a half months at the border point. Until two weeks ago, the
family slept outside without shelter. Plummeting nighttime temperatures
and strong winds make conditions on the plateau above Salloum difficult
to endure.

Absor said she recently saw footage of her former
community in Brega, now flattened. Her older sister, a college student
in Tripoli, has been unable to reunite with the family. Communication,
she said, was cut two weeks ago, and Absor's parents have not talked to
their daughter since. But Absor said she believes the uprising is still
worthy of the hardship wrought in its path.

"It's good," she says. "You have to make democracy."

As
the rebels challenged his rule in the east, Libyan leader Muammar
Qaddafi hired mercenaries from Sub-Saharan Africa to fight the unrest
sweeping the country. Though rebels claims to treat captured mercenaries
humanely, the fight against mercenaries has fostered an atmosphere of
discrimination and an attitude of suspicion towards Libya's foreign
African communities. And it fueled an exodus that continues today.

Mona,
a Darfuri migrant, who refused to give her last name, said rebel forces
visited her family's house in Benghazi two and a half weeks ago to
carry a warning.

"They said 'You have three days and then go,'"
Mona recalled. "Thirty men came to our house with guns and said, 'This
is our house. Go away.'"

Though the migrants remain in political
limbo, the international community is working to provide for their
basics needs. The International Committee for the Red Cross, the World
Food Program, and local Salloum residents all contribute one halal meal
daily per migrant. Doctors and nurses operate out of a small hospital
inside one terminal and from medical trailers parked outside.

"This
life here is hard but the UN gives a lot for them. Food, water,
medicine," said Mohamed Gad, a 21-year-old Cairene on his fifth
volunteer delegation to the border. "They give them everything."

Mona
said authorities at Salloum ensure the safety of those stranded there.
The migrants are able to move around freely and create a life of their
own, albeit transient and makeshift.

"We feel free," she said. "But after the war, we don't know what will happen to us."